13 Responses:

I haven't read much about how bad GNOME is recently, though it's been brought up in the past... I wonder if you have any new thoughts about the project, or if you haven't been keeping track? Sorry to spam your journal. Thanks for the new xscreensaver release!

No, I didn't already know, because they never, ever discuss things like this with me.

Mostly what I think of Gnome is "I wish they'd stop unilaterally forking my program without even talking to me about it first."

This is like the third time in five years that they've decided for some reason they need to "rewrite" xscreensaver.

The last time this happened, I completely reimplemented xscreensaver-demo (the GUI) to their exact specifications just to placate them. I thought that would mean that their "not invented here" games were over.

Apparently I was wrong.

The driving force behind Gnome seems to be, "oh, here's a neat program someone wrote! Let's rewrite it!" Even when that program has been free software for thirteen years, and has had hundreds of outside contributors.

That sucks. I'm not a developer, just a luser who has been reading the development lists... Anyway, it seems like this last split is the culmination of six or seven months worth of sporadic emails about the password prompt not being consistent with the rest of the GNOME dialog's (when you "lock screen" or whatever).

I like the screen now, with you're cool logo ;-), and it sucks that people don't send you patches so you couldn't both be happy. I was searching, but couldn't find where you may have said what a patch for this would need to look like for you to accept it. Do you have some qualifications for this dream patch?

That's a pretty banal version of "evil" you've got there: I think most people would classify that as merely "a huge waste of time." What circle of hell do you go to for that? Was it the one with the bad accountants?